By Talli Nauman, Esperanza Project
The moment the U.S. Forest Service posted its July notice of a draft decision to permit gold prospecting at Jenny Gulch here in the Black Hills, tribes, water protectors and treaty rights defenders turned out in droves to ward off the project and others like it.
By Jen Moore, Foreign Policy In Focus
Whether communities are fighting to address mining harms or standing in the way of these unwanted projects, their struggles are potent examples of the sort of reimagining and digging in for fundamental change that Arundhati Roy urged at the start of this pandemic.
By Talli Nauman, Esperanza Project
To make good on Joe Biden’s recent Presidential Memorandum for tribal consultation and strengthening nation-to-nation relationships, the U.S. Forest Service has rescinded its permit for a massive foreign copper mine that would engulf sacred Apache sites here.
By Jen Moore, Inequality.org
Over the years, the mining industry has taken advantage of dictatorship, disasters, and a variety of distractions to expand operations in Latin America. In the time of Covid-19, with entire populations under lockdown and economies falling apart, mining companies have also hopped on the pandemic profiteering bandwagon
By Tatiana Garavito, Sebastian Ordoñez, Hannibal Rhoades, Red Pepper
Leaders from the frontlines of mining struggles in the Philippines, Colombia and Uganda travelled to the UK this November to expose the true costs of the UK’s extensive ties to the global mining industry and oppose the Mines and Money Conference in London- a global hub of mining finance and power.
By Yessenia Funes, Colorlines
The EPA proposed yesterday (July 11) to remove restrictions for the planned Pebble Mine Project near Bristol Bay, Alaska. Alaska Native communities, along with fishermen, fought hard to establish protections for the proposed site, which holds valuable copper and mine but sits dangerously close to the watershed that is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery—a resource on which many groups of Native people rely for their culture and subsistence lifestyle.
By Yevgeniya Yatsenko, Sebastian Rosemont, Foreign Policy In Focus
Amid a natural gas boom, could U.S. activists ever dream of a national ban on fracking? If it seems impossible, they should look to the south for inspiration. On March 29, the small Central American nation of El Salvador passed a total ban on metal mining.
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
While politicians fiddle, citizens are again being left to suffer--perhaps none more than the nearly 23,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere, facing the loss of healthcare benefits.
By Sandra Postel, National Geographic Newswatch
The stage was set by decades of neglect and the near-absence of any requirements that mining companies take responsibility for preventing harm to people and aquatic life after they close their mines.
By Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams
The spill which sent toxic waste from an abandoned mine into a Colorado waterway last week released three million gallons of contaminates into the state's 126-mile Animas River—not one million, as previously announced, according to new estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).